By Kenna Eaton, General Manager

We’ve known for several years the roof on the store needed replacing. We could tell by the way it leaked and dripped any time it rained. What we didn’t know was the extent of the damage caused by the leaks over the years, until we had professional roofers up there checking it out. While I wasn’t surprised to hear that we needed to replace the entire roof (not just another patch), I was surprised to hear that the large skylight running up aisle 6—crackers, chips, and freezer—that brings in wonderful sunlight was in such bad shape that it needed to be removed and/or replaced. And I was even more dismayed when I heard the price of replacing it with a more functional version.

While we humans love to bask in the sun, food and other goods don’t—they just fade, rot, or worse. Frankly, sunlight is not a grocer’s friend. Over the years we’ve developed several tricks to cope with the sunlight that dares to enter our building, like covering it up with specially designed “sails” or rice paper, or even relocating the food that melts or molds in those sun beams. So now, given the price of both replacing the skylight and coping with mitigating the effects of the sun, we decided to go ahead and re-roof but not replace it.

And now the time for re-roofing is here. In fact, this week the roofers will be onsite, tearing off the old roof and replacing it. This project will take anywhere from 2-4 weeks depending on what they find under the old roof. Work will take place primarily from the south side of the store, inhabiting the courtyard, and shouldn’t interfere with any of our regular work or your shopping. For this project we chose a roofing material called TPO, the same roofing material we used on our new addition in 2019. TPO is a single-ply membrane that has long term heat, UV ray, and natural fungal resistance, plus flexibility without the need for plasticizers. It claims to be the greenest, environmentally friendly single-ply material out there. And TPO’s highly reflective white surface exceeds EPA’s energy star requirements, which can help reduce energy costs as well as the urban “heat island” effect.

And it’s very likely that our new produce case will finally be delivered and installed just as we are replacing the roof. Again, the coinciding of these two events was not the plan, but we are excited to finally get our new case, to get the floor leveled out, and to get our produce department back up and running as normal.

Lastly, I want to note that our county has finally moved into Phase 3. For the Co-op, and other grocery stores, as far as we can tell the only difference is that our allowable capacity doubles. Which means we will no longer need to meter shoppers. Everything else stays the same: masks, social distancing, and frequent hand washing. We will continue to staff the north door as much as we can to keep the carts clean and organized. And we will continue to evaluate the need for this additional work as the spring progresses. The hot/cold food bar will stay as is for now, but we will be bringing back self-serve soups, which apparently have been OK all along, but we were being extra cautious!